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Now that you have managed the manage , here is the next step on this project.

First impression: Much better

Now to the meat. Color choices are also much better, toned down and for the distance appropriate. Also stylized as colors go as well. When you start working on the foreground, you can increase color or dim/de-saturate what you have here at the moment. It is always surprising when you work on a project like this one how strong colors really are. The first thing that popped into my eye was the repetition of the scene, a thing that you should not do in a landscape, it never is like that in nature. Later you can use that deliberately as an effect or in a wall paper, but you are not working on that right now. Try to vary the heights a little bit instead, also the shapes.

The "beach" is too light, tone it down. The reflection needs to repeat what is reflected You started right with the mountains, but I do not see the sky, that lavender and cloudiness. Just take the top part of the image, flip it to mirror it, then run a gradient from blue > transparent from the bottom over the reflection. Make the reflection a little bit lighter than the real thing.

You should imagine what the sky higher up would look like, because that is what would reflect in the lower part of the water. Into that reflection comes the influence of the water itself and the bottom of the sea/lake, so the color can shift there into all sorts of different ways and can even show sand, rocks, tree trunks, old shoes , whatever you might find there.

I am glad you put the little wind surfer in, it lends a reality and scale to this rendering. The only thing I would have done is let him sail into the picture versus out of the picture. You always want to keep the attention of the viewer lead into the scene, not away from it. That goes for all graphics, renderings, paintings etc. I always imagine the work to be a circle, and all things have to be brought back to it, so the eye only gets guided within this shape and gets captured, trapped into it.

To make it more interesting, you can also imagine the sun coming from one side of this image. That would give you the opportunity to lay shadows in, to define better, but we get to that later. Let's just say it is a day without the sun being obvious.

You are definitely showing much improvement, I am looking forward to the correction of this step. Do that first, then we can go on after that. It looks like you had some fun

You can dim down the reflection a bit for now. It depends on what you will put in the foreground, sometimes you can exaggerate a shade to get more contrast or eliminate contrast. You made the "beach" too dark, make the line a little bit paler then the mountains. Think of what happens there: wave come in with a pale edge, the sand is a bit lighter, as a sum they will create a line that is a bit lighter.

Still turn the boarder around, but his placement will depend on what you do next anyhow.

Go on to the next step, then this step can be adjusted accordingly. I like the wave action on the water there in the front.

I will not be available for this until tomorrow. So, have fun playing with different versions

Hi -
Although I can see you're going for something monochromatic,
adding some variations in color can help to show depth.
Did a quick mock-up for you here to show what I mean.

Good luck w/ it,
El

It is nice, but the rendering was at the state of unfinished yet, the foreground is to come yet and that will be stronger. The way you have rendered the background LJK, is too strong for what we are doing right now

It is nice, but the rendering was at the state of unfinished yet, the foreground is to come yet and that will be stronger. The way you have rendered the background LJK, is too strong for what we are doing right now.

Yes, seriously. It is always a surprise once you pluck a painting or rendering apart, how little color you need/see in the background. Since you brought up studying the masters before, try to go and look at some of the older landscapes and see if you can not detect that. Take a Caspar David Friedrich as a great example to see what I mean. Here is a google image page and you find more from there. I have seen a lot of these paintings in person and it is remarkable how he understood this principle to create distance so very well.

There is a principle that can not be disputed, because that is how we see. You can translate that into very strong abstraction even if you use just one color, as I have shown with the gray schematic scape. Take green or red or blue, whatever.

In a landscape, the distant scape gets also much more influenced by the sky color, so distant mountains always look blue or grey or sunset color.

I really need to find the time to continue with this project. I have actually redesigned by website header so don't need the landscape anymore but would still like to master the art of making something I could use in the future.

Well its been a while but I think I might have some time to work on this again! Going for a slightly different approach but hopefully it will work. Will post either over the weekend or early next week.

Hi Owain It took me a while to look at your new way of doing the mountains.

So, you have done the fading into the distance now. I would still gray out the color more for the third row of mountains. Some of the shapes are a bit odd, more like waves than mountains.

The black foreground is not good. That is where you need to put detail to create a closer feel. I know that in evening light you sometimes have the foreground dark and the background colorful, but you have a daytime sky, therefore you must detail the nearest part of the landscape. The black is also void of any dimension, it is absolutely flat, head on.

In a landscape rendering it is always a good idea to create gaps in the first set of mountains or forest or whatever. You want to pull the eyes into the picture versus building a wall the way you did. Make the eye wander and explore. Look at photographs or paintings of a landscape that you like and try to analyze them. Divide up the picture into major blocks and see what the relationships of the weights of those elements are to each other.

The way you have done it looks like an attempt at a short cut. Always give it your all. I hope that you can use this little critique to build on. Do not give up.

I am very busy at the moment, but I will get to answering your posts, it just might take a bit

I think this is going to be a nightmare to complete, I don't seem to have as much free time either Thanks for all your comments and help in the past though. I might come back to this again but probably not.

If I find the time I will start a new thread but with rebuilding my own website, building someone elses site and also doing a full time job time to experiment with something I wont be using isnt a good use of time just now Not enough hours in a day!